ABSTRACT
Access to and control over land is key for the history of the Americas and are an important issue in many social struggles. Although land is a necessary (pre-)condition for all societies, it is systematically underestimated within social sciences. Mainly, the rural poor aim to acquire their own parcels of land to produce their own food. They face opposition from big landowners, who displace them and/or employ them as labourers on their farms and plantations. Within the field of political economy, intensive discussions have taken place about the importance of land for capitalist accumulation. In contrast, a far-reaching land reform in Nicaragua was initiated by the Sandinista government in 1980, which started by appropriating the land of the family of the former dictator Somoza. In the 1990s, the World Bank started to push for a new type of land reform in Latin America: a market reform.
